Author: Chris Coyier

I posted a little tip on CSS-Tricks the other day about how you can load only parts of other pages on a site via Ajax, and how to do that without needing additional HTML wrapping elements to keep it clean. A common criticism of this is that the Ajax request still loads the entire page, using all that bandwidth, it's just that it only places onto the page the part you specify via CSS selector.

The default URL for logging into your WordPress powered site is: http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php. Or if you've installed in a subdirectory, something like http://yoursite.com/wordpress/wp-login.php. I've wished that was a little cleaner, especially when you are doing something explaining to a client where to log in over the phone. Fortunately changing this can be very easy.

Have you ever wanted to close a comment thread, but leave a note to communicate why the thread is closed? Many blogs will just update the content of the blog post to say that comments are closed and why. That's better than nothing, but that puts the message in a bit of an awkward place. The ideal place for that custom messaging is after the comment thread, where the comment form would normally be.

I think WP Candy is really killing it lately being a great source of breaking quality WordPress news, interviews, and other articles. Now they have an iPhone app they developed in-house to bring all the content to you that way. They are rolling it out "reverse" style, where for two weeks it's $5.99 then later it drops to $0.99, so it's an opportunity for the community to opt-in to paying more to support the site, which is neat, especially considering their crazy no advertising policy.

MediaElements.js is an open source jQuery-based project (which I use and like) which allows you to use HTML5 video and audio in any browser all the way back to IE 6. It tests if the browser supports HTML5. If yes, it uses that. If no, it falls back to displaying the media through Silverlight or Flash. Regardless of what it uses, the UI is always consistant.

Now available as a WordPress plugin to make it even easier. Just use simple shortcodes to link up the video and specify what options you want (e.g. autoplay, fullscreen, etc).

In otherwords, match what you see when creating/editing a Post or Page in the WordPress visual editor to what you get when you actually publish it. It's easier than you might think! Basically you can declare a special CSS file that the visual editor will use to render itself while you are editing it. If the styles in that CSS file match the styles in your live theme's CSS file, you are straight up WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).

I created a course for Lynda.com which is an 4.5 hour, in-depth step-by-step tutorial course on creating a WordPress theme from start to finish. We start from nothing and consider our clients needs and CMS capabilities, then to go Photoshop, then to HTML/CSS, then to a WordPress theme. We go a bit further talking about topics like custom fields, JavaScript, and plugins. There is a lot here! Lynda.com subscriptions start at $25/month with no long-term commitment.

One of the themes that is an exclusive download to all you good-looking people that purchased The Book is the ALL AJAX theme. The idea behind it is that the page never1 reloads. Whenever an "internal" link is clicked, the main content area replaces itself with content that is fetched via Ajax.

Are you hosting your WordPress sites on one of those hosts where WordPress asks you to provide FTP details before upgrading itself or upgrading plugins? So when you click to do an upgrade, instead of just launching into it, you get a screen like this instead:

Have you ever seen WordPress archives where you select something (usually a month/year) from a dropdown and it takes you to a page where you can view that? It's fairly common. WordPress almost has built in functionality for it, since you can specifically tell the wp_get_archives() function that you want the values to be returned as <option></option>s. We can kick it up a notch though, and make the results show dynamically on the same page as the dropdowns through some Ajaxy JavaScript. We'll even allow for multiple dropdowns (include the category as well) and make sure it's flexible for your own alterations.

I've worked on sites in the past where I needed to get two values out of a custom field. For example, I was creating an eCommerce site where some products had options. The options were in a dropdown menu. Each option in the dropdown had a value for what you actually see, and then another value for how that option effected the price. When entering a custom field, I often did it like this:

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Chris Coyier is a real-world web designer who has been reaching for WordPress to power client sites for many years.
He subscribes to the theory that not only is WordPress capable of powering any website it is almost always the right choice.
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Jeff Starr is a professional developer, designer, author, and publisher with over 10 years of experience.
He works with WordPress on a daily basis to create high-quality sites with a focus on performance, security, and web standards.
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